Remembering numeric precision
Before diving into the benefits of adopting a mixed precision strategy, it is essential to ground you on numeric representation and common data types. Let’s start by remembering how computers represent numbers.
How do computers represent numbers?
A computer is a machine – endowed with finite resources – that’s designed to work on bits, the smallest unit of information it can manage. As numbers are infinite, computer designers had to put a lot of effort into finding a solution to represent this theoretical concept in a real machine.
To get the work done, computer designers needed to deal with three key factors regarding numeric representation:
- Sign: Whether the number is positive or negative
- Range: The interval of the represented numbers.
- Precision: The number of decimal places.
Considering these elements, computer architects successfully defined numeric data types to represent not only integer...
